Journeys of Music and Art is the title of a cycle of three lesson-concerts that I began several years ago.

But I have to say that even before inventing this cycle of lesson-concerts, I had already held introductory music listening meetings – mainly, but not only, in Italian high schools. I’m facilitated in these initiatives by the fact that I play an instrument (the guitar) that is particularly suited for this goal: first of all, it’s portable and can be carried anywhere, while still being musically complete – of an unexpected completeness for who hasn’t ever heard it played well – and extremely versatile, being able to interpret music from every era, from complex renaissance polifony to structuralistic works of the 1900s and postmodern works. Furthermore, young people (and whoever has recently been young) like the guitar, so it can function excellently as an “ambassador” of classical music (as Oscar Ghiglia, one of my teachers, said) even with people that claim to like it little or not at all. The fundamental reason for which I put effort into this work of popularization, which is side by side by my traditional concerts, is quickly said: I am profoundly convinced of the fact that the beauty of western music is “for everyone” and can be enjoyed by non-specialists having, besides, a great and irreplaceable educational potential.

Today instead, classical music and particularly the classical guitar often risk being relegated into a kind of niche for “aficionados”; it seems a shame to me, and then if the audience is too small there’s less work for the musicians…

After various assessments owed to the experimentation “in the field”, the form of the lesson-concerts today is now structured in a cycle of three encounters – each of which is performable autonomously, but also profoundly linked between them – that summarily review the history of music and art from the western Renaissance until now. The titles of the three encounters are: Renaissance and Baroque, Classicism and Romanticism, and From the late 1800s to Our Days.

The formula of each encounter is based on the proposition of listening to about 15 brief compositions, originals for guitar or transcribed from other instruments (I utilize the beautiful transcriptions by Andrés Segovia very much: celebrated classics for lute, harpsichord, piano, and I made some others myself) each of which is performed live at the same time with the projection on a large screen of a reproduction of a work of art, generally of the same period and paired for its expressive content. Like this, every encounter becomes centered on brief moments of performance (I try because of this to favor an attentive listening mood as much as possible, also utilizing as much as possible the possibilities for sound and lighting available at the place where I work); in such a moment, my attempt is to introduce the beauty as much as possible of every piece I play to each listener, with the addition of the projected images and readings, from one piece to the next,of brief literary aforisms selected by myself and generally written by the same artists and musicians present in the program.

I also owe the format of this to the exhibit “La Perdita del Centro” [The Loss of the Center] held at the Meeting of Rimini in 1999 (an exhibit that at its time echoed the title of the celebrated piece by Hans Sedlmayr) that matched works of contemporary art with literary works; this suggested to me the idea to propose a similar program involving music, and still today I utilize several images and literary texts that had a part in the Rimini exhibit. Only later did I elaborate the other two moments into the cycle, relative to the previous eras.

A program distributed to every audience member includes the author and title of every work of art, the proposed musical selection and the literary texts, some of which also get projected onto the screen. The musical pieces are numbered to favor the quick note-taking on the part of the listeners.

The brief concert (about a ½ hour) is preceded by a very brief spoken introduction, mainly methodological in character: this tends to suggest and privilege the listening method of the personal and open impact of everyone with what the work of art and musical piece (and their combinations I chose along with the text) will be able to communicate to us. Actually, it’s not given, especially in a school environment that one can arrive at a moment of this kind, open to a true listening; the idea can prevail, actually be favored by a certain attitude by teachers at school, to use audio and visual together as aseptic and superficial acquisition of exemplifications of a historical, philosophical or aesthetical speech. But “the method is imposed by the object” and art can’t be used this way. To make a banal example, it’s much more important to listen to music in a gathered silence than be able to “understand connections” right away: art certainly introduces us to the “human kind” from which it comes – without upsetting the “art for art’s sake” theorists, one can’t see how it couldn’t manage – but it does it through its own method, that is, not making a speech, but making an impact through the artistic object and vibrating in tune with its expressive content that we “have an experience” with instead of just “hearing one speak of it”. To use a joyful expression which isn’t mine, one is not only dealing with an awareness (and not mere feeling sensations and emotions), but an “affective awareness” in which all of the heart of man, reason and sentiment, and even to a certain point the physicality, are involved.It will certainly be useful to also systematically discuss the connections with culture, philosophy and history, but this is not the main goal of the lesson-concert. After the “performance” moment (which lasts about a ½ hour and during which I try to talk as little as possible to not interrupt the listening atmosphere) a moment of “words” is also foreseen, that starts from the experience made by each one and everyone listening, watching and reading. In this second moment, preferably starting from the observations and questions of the participants, I also try to give my motivations for the combinations of the texts, the musical pieces and the works of art that I proposed and to give some elements of comprehension of the several types of musical language utilized in the pieces I played. Therefore, in performing the entire cycle, one can comment on the formation of tonal music, the concepts of consonance and dissonance, scale, chord, major and minor modes, rhythm, timbre, modulation; some musical forms can be illustrated (Fugue, Sonata, Variations, Romanza), the passage from contrapuntal language to accompanied melody and the “disintegration” of tonality that comes at the beginning of the 1900s (rhythmic fragmentation, chromaticism, impressionism, expressionism, dodecaphony, minimalism…) as far as the proposition of a new constructivity on the part of some contemporary composers. The parallel with the language of art and poetry is sometimes very evident and helps the comprehension.

I’ve held my lesson-concerts in various forms and in different environments; mostly in the Italian high schools, as I said, but also (often in the form a a true concert and with the participation of the actress Paola Contini) with cultural centers in Italy and abroad and in universities (in Bologna and New York University).In all, maybe I’ve held around 100 concerts of the kind.

The experience has brought continuous refinements in the context of the lesson-concerts (for example, I learned to talk less during the performance part concentrating the “explaining” at the end, and the repertoire of the texts, pieces and images used expands and contracts according to the opportunities and discoveries that I continue to make). And so, with the evident limits of the structuring of the Journeys of Music and Art in the ambition to cover so vast a temporal arc (that leads to the necessity to only insert brief compositions and at the risk of transforming every moment into an excessive bombardment of sound, visual and textual stimulation – while utilizing artistic masterpieces that probably won’t be “burned” in one contact, but are helpful to experience with time) I feel able to say with satisfaction that this cycle represents a useful opportunity to be introduced to the beauty of classical western music, that also facilitates understanding its connections with history of culture and man. Regarding this, the practically constant response from the audience in the years reveals the objection of the opportunity to confront different artistic styles (music, art, literature). This seems to me an objection leading back to an ideological prejudice rather than seeing things how they really are; actually, even children from middle school – as it’s happened – don’t have any difficulty finding similarities between a piece of music and an image, maybe confronting my choice in matching them (but that’s great: the disagreement of a particular match doesn’t deny the method used, it confirms it). Sometimes it’s the “specialists” that don’t realize these very evident connections… On the other hand, I don’t intend to “translate” a piece of music into a painting or vice versa; I use the images and texts to favor the listening and highlight aspects contained in the musical piece that I propose: we’re dealing with linguistic analogies and similarities of sensibility that help to better relate with the music, forming a relationship that remains a personal adventure and not programmable beforehand.

Going to play in the schools (especially during school hours, and therefore, for an audience of children that haven’t spontaneously chosen to participate) is always a risk – if there aren’t the right listening conditions, it’s not that it goes “less well”; there’s a risk to be useless and therefore counterproductive. About these cases (just a few, fortunately) I can say that it’s not generally the children’s “fault” as much as an insufficient care and proposal of the gesture on the part of the teachers, who should be personally, and they the first, interested in the initiative so as to rub off on their own students. And it also depends on me to be able to keep the interest and adapt my performance a little at a time to the attention span of the listeners. Vice versa, in the many occasions in which the right mood is created (it happens every time when there are some teachers that take it to heart preparing it and accompanying the children), it’s beautiful to see how young people, presumably deprived of musical study, know how to admire the splendor of Bach, Scarlatti and Haydn, vibrate with the moving melodies of Mendelssohn, Paganini and Chopin, and shocked by the spectacle of the “Klaverstucken” by Shoenberg matched with works by Kandinsky and Klee, by the expressionistic cry of the “Frammenti da Ungaretti” by Gilberto Cappelli matched with “The Scream” by Munch and verses by Ungaretti (Cappelli composed the piece on my request and just for these occasions), or captured by the mechanic, minimalist and obsessive repetition of “A Room” by John Cage (a piece I transcribed from the original for piano) paired with the painting “Coke Bottles in Green” by Andy Warhol (just to give some examples; they are included in the program of contemporary music). Actually, sometimes in that moment that could be considered a priori more difficult, the encounter dedicated to the music of the 1900s (that dissonant music that can bring about nervous reactions even in cultured adults), it becomes particularly involving and stimulating for the students. “For the first time I felt that it was talking about me” one student said at the end of the listening dedicated to the 1900s. I, myself, modified my judgment of the piece by John Cage because of the experience I had playing it in these occasions. Here, the music-image connection is particularly evident that in a certain way, helps to soften the difficulty of the impact with the contemporary music that young people are generally not accustomed to. Creating that atmosphere of total silence caused by being struck by something beautiful, within the normality of a school classroom is particularly beautiful, an unusual experience in itself and strongly educational (sometimes silence is called for at school as a disciplinary measure or condition to be able to work, but when silence is created because of the invading of something beautiful that leaves their mouths and eyes wide open, it’s not lived by the child as a coercion of his personality, but it’s a humanly exemplar experience): “It didn’t even seem like we were at school!” someone commented.A nice phrase by my great maestro Segovia could summarize the motivation for and the experience made by myself in these encounters; of course, this also expresses a conception of concertizing as such, but it adapts particularly well to this kind of moment in which the educational concern is explicitly central:

“The artist is a man like all the others, and he mustn’t ever fall in love with himself. He would lose something forever…like all the others, but with a marvelous gift: and for this gift he must always stay close to every other man.”